Thursday, March 22, 2007

Have you reduced the lawn on your property?

With the official start of spring, National Audubon Society encourages homeowners to conserve water by replacing unneeded lawn areas with native plants. You'll find action plans and online resources via those links.

Our choices of plants, landscape materials and design, and garden practices have an enormous impact on our outdoor water use. Lawns require two-and-a-half to four times more water than shrubs and trees. Indeed, it is estimated that in the course of a single year, a typical suburban lawn uses 10,000 gallons of water over and above that provided by rainfall.

That's a sobering thought, particularly in this dressed-up desert in which I live.

We've removed at least a third of our St. Augustine yard, if not more. It gave my parents a heart attack at first ("how can you get rid of such beautiful grass????"), but now that all of the native wildflowers, shrubs and tress are coming in, they see how lovely it all is. Yay to less mowing! Yay to less water use!!